The background: A number of people have been telling us about Rhye, from Rhyl to Rio. Well, Rio. And they all agree on one thing: that this is the sound of soul abstracted and updated, abstracted from its original coarse sources in the 60s and smoothly updated to incorporate many of the touches and techniques available to the modern recording artist. They say of Rhye that they're like "Sade meets the xx" or "Sade in a studio with Hercules & Love Affair". Seems like Sade is the common reference, the consensus being that there is a sense of that artist's shiny ennui and listless sophistication about this project, which suits us just fine: we always found Sade quietly devastating, and we don't mean we fancy her. We're talking about her songs, as spacious – near-ambient in their stylish vacancy – as you'd expect from music designed to evoke hollowness and loneliness.

It is more a project than a personality-driven ego job. Rhye are a duo about whom precious little is known apart from the fact that one of them is from LA, or they met in LA, and they worked in Berlin, or met in Berlin and then recorded in Copenhagen. Anyway, none of it really matters because the music is quietly fabulous, and they may well get their wish about retaining their anonymity because the history of disco, of which this is an exquisitely enervated latterday variant, is one of backroom session musicians or console boffins making etiolated dance music fronted by gorgeously bored diva ciphers.

Their song 3 Days, from their debut EP, starts with the sighed admission, "Oh, I'm famished," and the way she sings it sounds as though she could just as easily have said "vanquished". It's some way to kick off a song intended for clubs and dancefloors. And does she really sing, accompanied by a glissando of harp: "It's just the nature of ruined love"? We're sure she does. And that's just the intro. It's followed by keyboards, aching chords, a funk-lite electronic rhythm and some ooh-oohs, all indeed recalling Sade's supperclub soul, only with a lustre, a sheen, to remind us what time, what year, it is. Throughout, the girl – female, really, she's a woman, she's lived a life, she's been hurt – sings in that hesitant, barely-emoting way that suggest she's exhausted after all that arguing and fighting.

It's not quite the "R&Bummer" of Drake/the Weeknd, but it's certainly more Smooth Operator than Sam & Dave. Hunger is Herculesesque, somehow effervescent but enfeebled, if you catch our drift. Is it too late to complain about how difficult it is to do this dance about architecture? It is lovely, that's for sure. Open, the lead track, a bittersweet symphony of handclaps and strings, finds our heroine gawping at her paramour's … belly? It's hard to tell – you can't make out the last word in each sentence, she sighs it, almost expiring, defeated by love. It's chic disco, in homage to Chic, the greatest ever exponents of rhythmic languor. With thanks to our friends in Rio (and Rhyl).